By Grupo de Trabajadores Socialistas– Impulso Socialista
The Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT) has made a call to take to the streets “to support Petro’s government” on November 15, in all cities of the country. Similarly, the Colombian Federation of Educators, Fecode, noting that “winds of national unity are blowing”, invites “to march in support of the leadership of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez”. It is quite likely that many union boards of directors in a bureaucratic manner, that is to say, without carrying out a democratic discussion among their bases, support this call.
The Grupo de Trabajadores Socialistas and Impulso Socialista, two organizations that are in a revolutionary position, defending the immediate and strategic interests of the working class and popular sectors, which are currently advancing in a process of unification, present some considerations and proposals.
We seek, above all, to establish a dialogue with the millions who, with their vote, guaranteed Gustavo Petro’s victory. Those millions of votes expressed the illusions and hopes for change and a solution to the great needs that afflict the Colombian people. For that reason, without sharing essential elements of the program of the Pacto Histórico, we placed ourselves electorally on their side, calling to vote against the reactionary option, supported by the enormous majority of the bourgeoisie, personified in Rodolfo Hernández.
Now that the government has taken office, the parliamentary alliances it considered convenient or accepted to form and the conditions established by those alliances, and after three months of action, it is important to reflect on whether we should take to the streets to support it.
What did millions expect from Petro’s government?
The millions who voted for Petro, who were the millions who participated or supported all the struggles that took place against the previous governments, especially against Iván Duque’s government in 2019 and in the National Strike of 2021, expected that once the government took office it would immediately adopt, in the term of days or weeks, effective, radical, profound measures to begin to solve their most urgent needs. So far, none of that has taken place. Let’s see:
-Food prices have skyrocketed and the government has not taken any measures to control them. Meanwhile, the galloping inflation has eaten away the small salary increase at the beginning of the year and the government, being able to do so, has not decreed a general salary increase.
-Unemployment continues and the government has not adopted any shock plan to reduce it; for example, by requiring all companies to hire new workers, reducing the working day and distributing the work among more workers, but maintaining wages.
-The millions of workers who suffer the torture of being tied to the State by orders for the provision of services or by definite term contracts are still subjected to the blackmail of their bosses for the renewal of their contracts; and it could have been decreed that they be employed for an indefinite term, with full labor guarantees.
– Large masses of the poor peasantry expected a true agrarian reform. Instead, the landowners of Fedegan will make the deal of the century, selling to the State (at good prices) three million hectares. Those three million hectares were taken from the peasantry by fire and blood during the previous decades. Nothing would have to be paid to them and the government, with the Minister of Agriculture at the head, will end up legalizing this dispossession by this means! No wonder José Felix Lafaurie is happy and very cordial with the government and its “land distribution”.
-Hundreds of young people prosecuted and detained during the outbreak of 2021 are still in jail and the government is dragging its feet on their immediate release and the halting of these judicial processes, while it negotiates with the sectors that oppose them. That, a central promise of Petro’s campaign that made thousands of young people trust him and back him with their vote, is being openly unfulfilled.
-The ESMAD, the infernal part of the repressive forces that has been ruthlessly attacking any kind of protest demonstration for years, continues “alive and repressing”. The government has decided not to proceed to its complete and total dissolution. On the contrary, we have seen it continue to fulfill its repressive function in the violent eviction of poor settlers who have occupied rural or urban lands.
-There are many other aspects in education, health, public services and others that we could point out, to which Petro’s voters expected prompt and profound solutions. For example, the reduction of utility rates, especially energy. The paltry reduction with which the government is trying to appease the anger of the population, especially in the Atlantic Coast, is a real mockery.
Waiting, until when and why?
Many comrades, especially those more committed to the member organizations of the Pacto Histórico, will say that “we must not despair”, “changes cannot happen overnight”, “we must be patient”, “this government is our government, we must trust it and we must give it time”. This is exactly what the government says, when solutions to needs that cannot wait are demanded.
The government has all the capacity to act now and decisively on the issues we have pointed out and on many others. If it did so, it would gain more support and sympathy than it obtained during the electoral campaign. Why doesn’t it do so? Why is it taking so long? Why do we have to wait?
The ultimate reason why the government does not act to provide immediate solutions to the urgent needs of millions is because it is committed to maintaining the essence of the current system in which a few thousand profit and take advantage of the work and wealth produced by millions. And Petro loudly proclaims a monumental falsehood: that it is possible to solve the needs of millions of poor people and, at the same time, for those few thousand capitalists to do better and better.
For this reason Petro formed his cabinet integrating representatives of political parties that for decades have acted against the workers, the poor and the oppressed of the country. For the same reason, he is developing agreements of all kinds with the government of the United States and with the governing bodies of economic and social policies at the service of the big world bourgeoisie. That is why it negotiated a tax reform which, as its Minister of Finance says, “was supported by all the international organizations, by the OECD, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund”. (El Espectador, November 6, 2022). That is why it maintains in the General Budget of the Nation an item of 77 trillion pesos for payment of the foreign debt, a fraudulent debt with which the imperialist countries subjugate dozens of poor countries.
Backing Petro or demanding solutions?
It is true that there are some bourgeois sectors, minority and quite discredited, such as the Democratic Center, which have begun to express, with demonstrations in the streets, their opposition to the government in Parliament. But there is no institution of the regime that is directly or violently confronting the government and that is planning to throw it out. Only in an exceptional case like that, an attempted coup d’état against a government that is the product of the popular vote, for example, could it be valid to call not exactly to support the government but to stop the attack on democratic rights that this would mean.
In the present situation of the country and of the government, the most important thing for the workers and popular sectors is to organize themselves, with absolute independence from government policies, to discuss the petitions, demands or claims to be presented to the government and to mobilize, pressing for an immediate solution to them. That should be the role of the union leaderships instead of acting, as they do now, as altar boys of the government.
The demonstrations on the 15th are not planned in the above terms. That is why we neither support them nor call for their participation. Instead, we propose that in every possible place, in every union, in every school, in every university, in every neighborhood, democratic assemblies be held in which the most urgent needs and demands of each sector are discussed and a list of immediate demands is drawn up and presented directly to the national government. Petro’s government is obliged to fulfill its promise of change. Therefore, the millions of us who supported him with our vote have every right to demand that the changes that cannot wait be made now.